Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (15 page)

‘Is that so, Adam?’ asked Sophie, stepping in as the recipient of Adam’s remark. ‘Well that’s
certainly
something for us to be proud of!’

~*~

When Cyril was woken by his radio the following morning, it was announcing the American government’s decision to order the destruction of the New York mammoths. He lay there for a few minutes, alone in his double bed, imagining the great creatures falling.

‘…According to a Presidential spokesman,’ said the radio in his kitchen as he ate his toast, ‘the mammoths, as the products of genetic engineering, represent a “usurpation of God’s prerogative and therefore a form of blasphemy”…’

He swigged back his tea, climbed into his car and turned on his third radio of the day.

‘…President Elisha Jones has ordered that the mammoths be burned and their ashes dispersed far out to sea in order to avoid contamination of American soil by what he called “unclean flesh, abominable to the Lord”.’

Cyril sighed. He didn’t feel so sad for the mammoths themselves, for they belonged in the past and had no real home in this world, but he was keenly aware of the hurt this would cause to his grandson Adam. It would bewilder his simple rational soul.

He set off on the ten-kilometre journey via the Portway, Ashton Gate and Bedminster to his place of work. He had been to and fro along this same road so many times before that it had come to seem as if he would go on the same way forever, but now the end was in sight. He would do this journey – how many times was it? – another twenty-seven times and then that would be it.

He imagined Adam taking the zoo booklet out from wherever he had carefully stored it, turning to the pages about mammoths and using a ruler to neatly cross out the statistics about the New York animals.

~*~

‘Quiet night, Dave?’ he asked the line officer as he passed through the Thurston Meadows checkpoint at 8.45.

‘Not bad,’ the policeman replied. ‘Dan Wheeler and a couple of his mates tried to shift some dodgy dreamy sets over the Line
again
, but we nicked them.’

Cyril smiled. The Wheeler/Pendant/Delaney clan were well known in the Zone and had become a kind of running joke for the people who worked there.

‘Well, you’ve got to admire Dan’s persistence,’ he said. ‘Holding down a steady job would be child’s play by comparison.’

The policeman shrugged. ‘Well, that’s dreggies for you.’

There was a time when Cyril would have challenged the abusive epithet but now he let it pass. It was a bit late now to try and change the world.

Electronic readers in the road surface checked out the registration, chassis and engine numbers of Cyril’s car as he passed over the Line.

~*~

Now Cyril drove down Meadow Way, the central axis of the Thurston Meadows Zone, looking out with a bewildered, guilty affection at the people in the streets. He had worked on the Zone since it was built and knew many of them by name. Nowadays he seriously doubted whether his work had helped anyone and feared that he might have made things worse, but this had been his life, and contemplating the loss of it was like facing a second bereavement.

Here was old Janie Delaney, who lived in a third-floor flat with its kitchen so crammed full of piles of newspapers and magazines that she had to cook on a camping stove on the living room floor. Here was crazy ‘Alien’ Watson, ranting at the top of his voice on the corner of Magnolia Street about Sin and Filth and the End of the World, but pausing to give Cyril a friendly wave. Here was grossly obese Tracey Parkin for who, when she was a little girl, Cyril himself had gone to court to obtain an order to remove her from her chaotic and neglectful mother and place her with a foster-family in Clifton. Now she was pushing her own baby along in a buggy on the way to the DSI Family Centre. Her equally obese mother, Jenny, was shuffling along beside her, Tracey’s constant companion and closest friend.

‘What did we think we could achieve?’ Cyril murmured. ‘What did we think we were trying to do?’

The side roads had alphabetical names, beginning with Asphodel Way and Buttercup Drove and ending up with Yucca Walk and Zinnia Avenue. Then came the Zone’s Central Square where there was a chip shop, a budget supermarket, a newsagent and, of course, a dreamer rental shop, with its lurid posters advertising games such as ‘Warm Gore’ and ‘Sex Heaven’ and ‘Ripper Killer’. The shops formed three sides of the square. On the fourth side was the seat of government, the DSI compound which Charles had visited for the first time the previous week. It had a large blue sign outside:

The staff who worked there called it Fort Apache.

~*~

Another car pulled up next to Cyril’s.

‘Mr Burkitt!’ the driver greeted him as they both climbed out. ‘I believe I’m coming to the same meeting as you.’

Cyril stared blankly. He was finding it increasingly hard to remember faces. He blamed it on getting old but the problem wasn’t really caused by a hardening of his physical brain so much as by his ever-increasing tendency to shut out the external world and deal with it only at the most superficial levels of his mind. Often he felt as if his body were a machine he operated by remote control from some far off hiding place where no one could find him.

‘Oh… yes… Dr Rajman isn’t it?’

The smart young man nodded. He was a Sponsored GP paid by the DSI to take on a quota of non-fee-paying patients who were on the Social Inclusion Register. The arrangement was a residue of the free National Health Service of the previous century.

‘Of course the meeting isn’t for another half an hour yet,’ said Cyril.

‘I know, but I’ve got a bone to pick with the finance people here and I thought I might as well sort it out while I’m over this way. They’ve sent me the wrong cheque three times in a row.’

Cyril smiled, a little sourly. Most young doctors did Sponsored work for a few years until they built up their own lists of private patients. In his experience, complaining about the DSI bureaucracy was one of the stages in a rite of passage. It gave the doctors a principled reason for dropping their Sponsored work later on when the private work had picked up. (‘Of course I’d have loved to have gone on helping out on the Zones, but I’m a doctor, god damn it, not a filler in of forms!’)

Cyril placed his forefinger on the print reader outside the staff door and spoke into the voice checker: ‘Cyril Burkitt. I’ve got Dr Rajman with me, who’s come for the 9.30 registration conference.’

~*~

Up in Cyril’s office his loyal secretary Alice had his coffee ready.

‘How was your zoo trip with the boys?’

‘I’ll tell you what, Alice, I was glad to be coming in to work this morning for a rest. They wear me out!’

‘Well I’ve got the agenda and the reports ready for your first meeting, so you’re all set.’

Alice was the one who actually
ran
the system that Cyril was nominally in charge of. She made sure that papers were filed in the right places, that letters went out on time to where they were supposed to go and that Cyril, who was quickly bored by details, was adequately briefed about problems likely to come up. She also made his coffee for him, remembered his birthday, and reminded him about the birthdays of his daughter and his two grandsons.

‘So, what do you reckon? Is this shifter business calming down yet?’ asked Cyril, sipping from the warm cup and feeling the welcome zing of caffeine spreading out through his veins.

‘Oh God I
hope
so,’ said Alice. ‘We’ve got enough to do without policemen and immigration officers and God knows what all over the place, haven’t we? I’ll just leave you to look over the reports now if you don’t mind, Cyril, because I need to go and make some extra copies.’

‘Do you think we really do any good here?’ Cyril asked her. ‘The DSI, I mean. Do you think it adds to the sum of human happiness?’

Alice laughed but didn’t bother to answer as she hurried off the photocopier. She simply didn’t think in those terms. She could work for a firm producing nerve gas and would still feel that she was doing her bit for the general good, just as long as she was allowed to remember people’s birthdays and buy them cakes when they were feeling down.

She might be right too, Cyril thought. Perhaps the cog-wheels of the machine ground on in their own way regardless of human will. Perhaps some law of nature meant that it was impossible to devise a system that would do good without causing an equivalent amount of harm. If so, then the best mere humans
could
do was indeed to be as kind as they could be to those they found around them.

He barely glanced at the papers. He had done this job long enough to be able to extemporise. Instead he took his coffee to the window and looked out. His office was on the fifth floor, and he could see right across the Thurston Meadows Zone into the ‘fringe’ estate of Thurston Rise, just outside the Line, where the working-class inhabitants clung precariously to their low-paid jobs and their standard white ID cards, free of the red stripe that marked out the cards of Social Inclusion citizens. Beyond Thurston Rise, and across the Cumberland Basin, was the
real
Bristol, that proud prosperous city, made wealthy and strong by slaves and tobacco and arms, shining on its hills.

The phone rang just as he finished his coffee.

‘Hello? Cyril Burkitt here.’

‘Burkitt, you deskie swine,’ whispered a voice from the depths of hell. ‘Listen carefully. Very soon you’re going to die.’

~*~

‘So how are you getting on with that deskie girl?’ asked Fran Stevens.

Fran and Charles had driven over to Weston-super-Mare in Fran’s new Audi to interview three young shifters the police had picked up an hour previously.

Charles was startled.

‘How on Earth do you know about her?’

‘Because Ted saw you in a pub with a girl who looked just like the social worker from Thurston Meadows who was in the papers. And I noticed that you had said nothing whatever about going out with anyone, which is secretive even for you, darling. And I put two and two together. You
are
seeing her, aren’t you?’

‘Well yes, I am. But keep it to yourself. We aren’t really supposed to socialise with people we work with are we, let alone people who’ve been suspended because of…’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake Charles, why are you such a terrible fusspot about the rules? Maybe it would cause a problem if we socialised with shifters or illegal immigrants. But a social worker who once dealt with the same case as you?
Please!
You really ought to lighten up a bit, my dear.’

Charles had always struggled with the fact that other people treated rules as things to be evaded wherever possible. Didn’t people see that speed limits were there for a reason? Didn’t they see that if one person falsified an insurance claim it just meant that everyone else would end up paying for it? He didn’t understand how people could be so cavalier about these things. And yet…

The stolen slip in his sock drawer surfaced very briefly in his conscious mind. He pushed it back down again.

‘We’re getting on pretty well,’ he said. ‘We seem to have a lot in common.’

Fran pulled into the car park of Weston police station. The two of them climbed out.

‘Someone’s done a shift already,’ Fran said immediately.

Charles nodded. Like her, he could feel the agitation in the air, the sense of rupture. The spooked faces of the desk staff, and their effusive welcome, only confirmed what the two of them already knew. (Who were they really? Nobodies, minor civil servants at the bottom end of the great chain of government. And yet their work had exposed them to psychic experiences which most people had no inkling of.)

‘Just vanished,’ said the custody sergeant, a fat Welshman with a handlebar moustache. ‘Two of them. Vanished just like that. No one’s touched the lock. No one’s moved the bars on the window. I can’t understand it. They’ve disappeared from a locked cell.’

‘No one can understand it, dear,’ Fran said soothingly. ‘No one can. It’s just one of those things. Fish swim, birds fly, shifters shift. But you’ve still got one left, haven’t you? Take us straight to him, and we’ll see if we can get some sense out of him before he disappears in a puff of smoke as well.

‘You’ll want these won’t you?’ the sergeant said, producing a plastic bag and two tobacco tins, each containing slip. ‘Only I’d really like to get them off my hands.’

Fran dropped them into her shoulder bag.

‘We’ll give you receipts a bit later if that’s alright,’ Charles said. ‘We ought to go and see this chap before he disappears.’

‘Certainly,’ said the custody sergeant. ‘Only it’s not a chap, it’s a girl.’

~*~

Andrea was a pale willowy creature with huge grief-stricken eyes, a mass of wispy red hair and a long wispy greenish dress. Her face was innocent as a tiny child’s and she wore facial jewellery in her nose, her ears, her lips and her eyebrows. She was about eighteen.

‘You’re the DMO are you?’ she asked. (DMO. Charles noted the term with a certain stamp-collector satisfaction: it was another one he hadn’t heard before.) ‘I don’t think you can pump me out now, it’s too late. It’s been in my system for a good three hours. I’m going to go any minute. Tim and Gary have gone already haven’t they?’